Privacy Policy
This page sets out what Blue Hole Men collects about you, who else holds it, and what you can make us do about it. It covers blueholemen.com and our newsletter.
The awkward part first. A site that is free to read and paid for by advertising collects more about its readers than a subscription site does, because the advertising that funds the reporting gets counted and some of it gets targeted. We would rather write that at the top than bury it. Where the money comes from is on our ownership and funding page.
What we collect
Most of what we hold exists because a web page cannot load without it. The rest arrives because you typed it into something.
Nothing here asks for your name, address or date of birth. We do not buy reader data from brokers, we do not sell or rent the newsletter list, and we do not profile individual readers for our own use. What we look at is aggregate: which stories were read, and which were abandoned in the first paragraph.
- Analytics data. Pages viewed, time on the page, the site or search that sent you, device and browser type, and a rough location from your IP at city level or wider.
- Server and log data. IP address, user agent, the file requested and a timestamp, written automatically by our hosting and delivery layer so the site can be defended against abuse.
- Newsletter data. Your email address, the date you subscribed, and whether recent emails were opened or clicked.
- Comment data. The display name and email address you register, your comment, and the IP address recorded when you posted it, used for moderation and spam filtering.
- Advertising identifiers. Cookie and device identifiers set by the exchanges that fill our display slots, plus the interest inferences those companies attach to them.
Why we are allowed to hold it
Every use of personal data needs a lawful basis under European and UK data law. Ours are consent and legitimate interests. Consent covers the advertising and analytics identifiers above, and the newsletter. You gave it in the banner or the signup box, and you can take it back at any time without giving a reason.
Legitimate interests cover what a publisher does to stay online: logs so we can spot an attack, spam filtering on comments, and counting readers in aggregate so we know which sections are worth staffing. Object to any of it and an editor deals with the objection rather than sending you a copy of this page.
Who else touches it
We do not run our own mail servers or write our own analytics. A handful of suppliers therefore process reader data for us, each under a contract limiting them to what we asked for: a hosting provider and content delivery network, an analytics provider, an email delivery service, a comment spam filter, and the ad server and exchanges that fill unsold inventory.
We will not print a vendor list that is wrong by October, so write to support@blueholemen.com and we will tell you who is in the chain today. Once an identifier reaches an exchange, that company uses it under its own policy as well as ours, and refusing advertising consent is what keeps them out.
Cookies and the consent banner
Cookies and the files that behave like them do nearly all of the work above, so they get a page of their own. Our cookie policy lists the categories, who sets them and how long each lasts.
The consent manager opens from the link in the site footer, switches any non-essential category off, and takes effect on the next page load. Turning advertising off raises no paywall and the ads do not disappear. They become untargeted, which pays us less. That is the trade.
Your rights in the UK and the EU
If the GDPR or the UK GDPR applies to you, you have rights we cannot charge you for and are not allowed to make difficult. There is no form and no portal.
Write to support@blueholemen.com with the request in plain words. We answer inside one month and usually inside a week. Where we need to check you are the person the data belongs to, a reply from the address in question is normally enough.
- Access to the data we hold about you, and a copy of it.
- Correction of anything inaccurate.
- Erasure, subject to records we must keep for legal or accounting reasons.
- Portability of what you gave us, in a machine-readable file.
- Restriction of processing while a dispute is open.
- Objection to anything done on the basis of legitimate interests, and an absolute right to object to direct marketing.
- Withdrawal of consent whenever you like, and a complaint to your data protection authority if we handle it badly.
Your rights in California
Under the CCPA as amended by the CPRA you can ask which categories of personal information we collected, where they came from and who received them, and ask for a copy, a correction or deletion. You can tell us not to sell or share it, and we cannot treat you worse for asking. An authorised agent can make the request for you.
We do not sell personal information for money. We do let advertising partners set identifiers for cross-context behavioural advertising, which California law calls sharing, so we treat it as sharing rather than argue about the definition. Switching the advertising category off is the do not sell or share mechanism here, and a browser sending the Global Privacy Control signal counts as an opt-out.
How long we keep things
Nothing is kept in case it turns out to be interesting later. Each category has a period, and when it runs out the data goes.
Server and security logs are held up to 30 days. Analytics records last 14 months in a form that could be tied to a device, then survive only as aggregate counts. Newsletter data stays until you unsubscribe, after which the address sits on a suppression list so nobody adds you again by accident. A comment and its account stay while the comment is published, and go on request. Advertising identifiers run to the cookie policy lifespans.
Children
This is a general news site written for adults. It is not directed at children, we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 13, and we do not profile children for advertising or serve advertising targeted at them.
Where local law sets the age of digital consent higher than 13, as several European countries do at 14, 15 or 16, the higher age applies. If a child has given us an email address or posted a comment, a parent or guardian can write to support@blueholemen.com and the account and the data are deleted, without anybody having to prove anything elaborate.
Data crossing borders
Our readers are spread across many countries and so are the companies keeping this site running. Some process data in the United States or elsewhere outside the UK and the European Economic Area, so reader data leaves the place it was collected in.
Where that happens we rely on the safeguards the law provides: an adequacy decision covering the receiving country where one exists, and the Standard Contractual Clauses with the UK addendum where one does not. Nobody should oversell that. A contract is a legal safeguard rather than a technical one, and the consent banner is the part that keeps your data out of the advertising chain.
Changes, and where to send a request
When this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or who receives it, the date at the foot moves and a notice sits on the site for a fortnight. Small edits for clarity happen without one. We do not mail the changes to subscribers, because a newsletter about a policy page is not what anybody signed up for.
Every privacy request, complaint and awkward question about this page goes to support@blueholemen.com, read by editors rather than a support desk. Our contact page explains how to label a subject line so it lands in the right pile.
Last updated: August 2026
